by Jenny Jacobs
“What I’m saying is I’m not looking for marriage or commitment or kids or anything long term. I’m looking for someone to have fun with. Uh, not someone saving herself for marriage, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do know what you mean. It’s just that — ”
“I lost my legs,” Jeremy said. “Not my — ”
“Dick,” Rilka finished for him, hoping that saying the crudity herself would prevent her from blushing.
Jeremy looked taken aback. “I was going to say ‘sex drive.’”
Rilka ended up blushing anyway. Someday she’d learn to let people finish their own damned sentences. “Well. I’m assuming everything is — ”
“Fully intact and operational,” Jeremy assured her. “Feel free to take it for a test drive.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Rilka said primly, which made him smile. She’d been wrong in her initial assessment of him. He was attractive once he relaxed a little, once he smiled, attractive in that former Army man way, with a strong physique, maybe from pushing the chair around and doing physical labor. It was possible to see he could be charming, if he exerted the effort. Assuming there were women who wouldn’t be put off by a physical disability, and she had just enough faith in her gender to believe this was possible, why was he here? Looking for the third kind of woman, yes, but somehow she suspected it wasn’t that simple. Or maybe it was. What did she know?
“So what do I do?” Jeremy asked and Rilka realized she’d been staring at him for too long. “I’m assuming you don’t have any women in your files with ‘double amputee’ listed under ‘preferences.’”
“You’d be surprised what’s listed under ‘preferences,’” Rilka said darkly. Honest to God, the human race never ceased to amaze her. She tried to have faith. She really did. “But you’re right, I’m fresh out of requests for men missing their legs.” She figured the diplomatic touch was lost on him, which was good because she’d already used up what she had. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t help you.”
“Of course not,” Jeremy said. “I was sure you’d be resourceful.”
“My reputation must precede me,” Rilka said, raising an eyebrow. She never asked where people got a referral because she didn’t want to know. Her name was probably written on every bathroom wall from here to Wichita.
“Tom Daniels is a buddy of mine.”
“Tom?” Rilka raised her other eyebrow. “He didn’t meet Elaine here.”
“That’s true. But he gives you credit for hanging in there.”
“He ran through every female I’ve ever met,” Rilka said. “Plus some I got out of the phone book. And then he met Elaine at work and bam.” If Rilka knew Tom, he was damned lucky to walk away with a wife instead of a sexual harassment lawsuit.
“True. But you didn’t give up on him.”
“I don’t give up on anyone,” she said piously, but then the streak of honesty she hadn’t quite drowned yet forced her to add, “Which isn’t to say people don’t give up on me. No one in this business has a one hundred percent success rate. But I’ll keep trying as long as my client wants me to.”
“You do that very well.”
“What?”
“The standard disclaimer and sales pitch. Nicely done. Almost like a regular conversation.”
This one was going to try her patience, that was clear. Of all the qualities a matchmaker needed, patience was the most important and the one quality Rilka had the least amount of. It will be a learning experience, Gran used to say, when Rilka had to do something she didn’t want to do. Rilka hated learning experiences. She sighed and said to the newest one, “So are you sold?”
“Sure. I’ll take the rustproofing and the extended warranty, too, please.”
“Just step into the finance office and we’ll get you set up.” Rilka couldn’t help the smile. Her clients were usually a little more respectful of her. Self centered enough not to want to get off on the wrong foot with her, she supposed. When you were their last hope, people tended to be careful in their dealings with you.
“So what’s next?” he asked.
“When someone has a physical disability or disfigurement, I usually suggest they find a hangout — a place where they can be a regular. That’s how you get people to look past the disability and get to know the real you.”
“Uh huh,” Jeremy said. “But I’m just trying to get laid.”
“Aren’t we all,” Rilka said with feeling. Five years without the whiff of a man. No one since Davis. She didn’t want to die with Davis having been her last lover. She didn’t understand how that worked. Men never went five years without getting any.
But then, Rilka had standards, so perhaps that explained it. Seventy-five percent of male college students would have a one-night stand with an attractive woman. Someone had actually done a study. None of the women in the study had been willing to sleep with an attractive stranger. So either women were more sensible than men or they were all liars.
Rilka didn’t actually want a one-night stand, nor did she really want a relationship. The last five years had put her off men pretty well. Women, too, but that was less problematic as far as sexual relationships went. Sometimes she felt like she’d spent all of her optimism on her clients and hadn’t kept any for herself. She had a hard time believing there could be a happily ever after for her.
Jeremy was waiting for her to say something. She wracked her brain trying to remember what they’d been talking about. Then she had it. “Look, you said yourself that you attract two kinds of women. Well, I’m trying to help you figure out how to attract a third kind.”
“Bimbos?” he asked hopefully.
“Jeremy, if you want to hire someone I’m sure we can find — ” She stopped herself before she could say something that would get her arrested for pandering.
“I’m joking,” Jeremy said. “Sort of.”
“Will you trust me on this?” Rilka said and realized that, all things considered, he probably shouldn’t. “Do you have a favorite watering hole?” She sometimes suggested sports leagues or continuing education programs, but she was pretty sure he’d have a smartass remark to either of those suggestions.
“Last Call,” he said.
“That’s a cop hangout.”
“Army, too.”
“How many women frequent that place?” Rilka demanded. Honestly, no wonder people needed her help.
“Uh.” Jeremy thought for a moment. “None. Maybe a cop groupie or two.”
“Okay.” Rilka felt she could rest her case. “Do you go anywhere else?”
“I get to Bennie’s now and then.”
“That’s a biker bar.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Sure, but you’re looking for women. The only women at Bennie’s are the hookers the boys run.”
Jeremy’s eyes widened. “You know a lot about the local bars,” he said respectfully.
“Not by choice,” Rilka said. “It’s an occupational hazard.”
“What, you go there to scope out the goods? So you can match ’em with your desperate clients?”
Rilka closed her eyes. When she opened them he was still there. “No. People go to bars to meet people. It’s a way my clients can work on their interpersonal skills without risking much. But I have to know the clientele before I send someone out for a beer to practice their flirting skills.”
“You have to teach people how to flirt?” Jeremy asked. “These are grown adults?”
This from the man who hadn’t realized women didn’t hang out at his favorite bar.
“You have no idea,” Rilka said. “You don’t think people come to me just because they have trouble sorting through all the offers, do you?”
“I know why I came to you — ”
“Yeah, we’ve identified your problem. Your first step is to become a regular at a different kind of bar.”
“We don’t need a place with a dance floor,” he said helpfully.
“I’m sure y
ou could figure out how to dance if it meant you’d get laid,” Rilka said.
Jeremy grinned at her. “I don’t think you can guarantee that,” he said. “But you’re right. I didn’t like to dance even before the Iraqis bombed my convoy.”
“So no dance floor,” Rilka said. She considered him for another moment. “Not a yuppie place.”
“Hey. Do I appear to be a low-class loser?”
“That’s not what I said. I implied you’re not a yuppie. I suspect you don’t want to find yuppie women. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Okay. Let me think. Henry’s on Sixth?” she suggested. “That’s the kind of place you can be a regular.” Plus she knew the bartender and could put in a good word.
“Huh,” Jeremy said. “Guess so. I can’t shoot pool worth a damn anymore — ”
“Learn,” Rilka said.
“What?”
“Sit on the damned table if you have to. Or take up darts. Just do something besides drinking three beers a night for the next ten years.”
“First you tell a guy to start hanging out in bars. Then you tell him he can’t drink. You’re no fun.”
“I don’t have to be fun.”
“But would it kill you to try?”
“Very probably,” Rilka said. “So your first assignment — ”
“Yeah, I get it,” Jeremy said.
“If you’d like some company, I’ll go with you a time or two until you get comfortable.”
“All part of the service?” He waved a hand at her. “How can I pick up chicks if you’re sitting next to me?”
“That could be a problem. I could sit two bar stools over. You know, supportive but not confusing to the female clientele.”
“I’ll get my brother to go.”
“Good idea. He won’t interfere with the picking up of chicks, will he?”
“Nah. Nate’s a great wingman.”
“Okay. So give me a call in a couple of weeks, let me know how it’s going.”
“That’s it? I can hang out in bars without your help.”
“Your approach has been working so well for you, hasn’t it?” she snapped.
“You know, if I went with that online service, I wouldn’t have to put up with the snarky comments.”
“Yes, but you wouldn’t get the personal touch you so desperately need,” Rilka said. “Look. Just do what I suggested. Then we’ll take the next step.”
“Which is?”
“Depends on what you report.”
“Yes’m,” he said, snapping off a crisp salute.
“That concludes our business,” she said with a grin. “You can go away now.”
“Good to meet you, too,” he said, flicking the brakes off his chair and wheeling out of the room.
When she’d closed the front door behind him, she leaned against it for a moment and heaved a deep sigh of relief. He was going to be a problem child and not just because of his missing legs. It would take a special woman to get through the attitude and make the effort of getting to know him, not dismissing him on first meeting.
She knew what he wanted and it wasn’t just getting laid. He wouldn’t have shown up at her door if that was what he wanted. But if he couldn’t even admit to himself that he wanted a life partner, how was he ever going to meet one? And what Rilka had to believe was that beneath the flippant remarks there existed a man worth knowing. She hoped so, anyway. If only she could find the woman who didn’t mind wading through the thorns.
There’s someone for everyone, she reminded herself. Her grandmother had really believed that, but Rilka no longer did. She herself was an excellent example. She was thirty-seven and working on her sixth year of celibacy. She’d never found “the one.” Gran used to say love didn’t blossom only between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, and that you never knew …
To Gran, that was the beauty, the promise, the hope, of her work. To Rilka it was a depressing commentary on it. You didn’t know there was someone for everyone. You just had to believe it. Or not.
Rilka glanced at the brass mantel clock and saw she’d have time for a quick sandwich before Duncan’s early afternoon appointment. Good. She was going to need sustenance to deal with him.
Chapter 2
Jeremy rolled down the sidewalk to where his truck was parked at the curb. When he got back to work, his brother was going to ask him how it went, and Jeremy was going to say, “It went weird.”
Not what he’d expected when Nate had handed him a card with an address, a name, and a time, and said, “I made the appointment for you. Be there.”
A flare of anger had burned low in his stomach and Nate, correctly anticipating that, had said, “Look, I met Sandra on an online dating site. How pathetic is that?”
“Pretty pathetic,” Jeremy had agreed.
He hadn’t tried the online route because he knew if he disclosed his … situation, he’d get the two kinds of women he’d already had enough of, but if he didn’t disclose his situation, he’d have to go through the shocked surprise with every woman he met. Rilka had managed her reaction pretty well, but most people didn’t. What he couldn’t stand was when someone seemed disappointed to meet him. He had a fairly sturdy ego, but he got tired of that. Really tired of that. Bad enough at the shop when customers weren’t sure he could do the work. It was plain depressing in his personal life when women wrote him off before he opened his mouth because he wasn’t what they pictured when they pictured what true love would look like.
Rilka had been expecting a regular Joe but she hadn’t been disappointed in him. Of course, she hadn’t been looking at him as a potential mate.
“You need someone to weed out the jerks,” Nate had said.
So Jeremy had sucked it up and he’d gone, exposing himself and his insecurities and his vulnerabilities to the matchmaker, whom he’d assumed would be something along the lines of an elderly Jewish grandmother. His heart had thudded way too happily when he’d seen the dark-haired woman about his age open the door. Like everyone else, she’d looked first where he would be if he could stand, then dropped her eyes to where he sat.
Which meant Nate hadn’t mentioned about the wheelchair, or the missing legs, both above the knee. But he understood it was kind of hard to work into ordinary conversation.
Jeremy had bantered with her about getting laid, his stomach twisting into a knot because he kept thinking, It’s not just sex I want. But he didn’t know how to say that. Especially not to Rilka, who seemed to hate men, women, and love. Sort of not the mindset he’d expected from a matchmaker.
Yeah, it went weird pretty much summed it up.
• • •
Every time Rilka opened the door to Duncan O’Hayre, he took her breath away. He was gorgeous, in a knee-weakening, resolve-undermining way, all dark hair and sleepy eyes and sex. He dressed like a man on the cover of GQ, even when he was just strolling to the corner grocery for a quart of milk. He had charming manners, a body like a Greek god, and he smelled good enough to make her want to strip and roll in him. His voice, deep and husky, sent a shiver down her spine. The icing on the very yummy cake was that he was straight, so when you had a fantasy about him, you thought, Hey, it could happen.
Unfortunately, he was — well, there was no politically correct, perfectly sensitive way to put it. He was dumber than a box of rocks. He could get dates, he just couldn’t get girlfriends, and he had come to Rilka to change that. I want someone to grow old with, he had said soulfully and at the time she hadn’t understood how that could be hard. So far Rilka hadn’t been able to get him past a third date and most of the time not past a first.
He had a successful modeling career only because his manager ran herd on him, assigning him an assistant to make sure he got to his shoots on time and followed directions appropriately. He was such a sweetie. He tried so hard. And yet. His current assistant was sitting behind the wheel of the town car parked at the curb. Rilka waved at the girl and shut the door
.
“How’s it going?” she asked Duncan as she headed down the hall.
“Fine,” Duncan said vaguely, following her into the kitchen. He took the chair she offered and smiled pleasantly at her. It really took someone special to be too dumb to model without help.
You look and you look, Rilka thought, but there’s no one home. She sighed. From long experience, she did not offer him refreshment. He would not be able to decide between tea or juice without debating the pros and cons of each beverage at interminable length.
“How did your date with Cynthia go?” she asked cautiously, sitting across from him at the table. Cynthia had already reported in.
A frown marred his perfect forehead. Then, as if he had become aware of it, he immediately smoothed the expression away.
“Cynthia,” he said with a bone-melting smile. “Cynthia, Cynthia.”
Rilka helped him out. “Tuesday. The Grill Room. Tall redhead.”
“Oh, yes.” His lips twisted in a grimace. “Oh, my. Oh, my.”
“So you didn’t really hit it off.”
“Oh, my. No. We did not hit it off.”
Cynthia had already said that she’d ditched him by going to the bathroom and not coming back, a dating infraction that usually earned a long lecture from Rilka and the threat of being dropped as a client. We must be polite to one another, Rilka always said. Be direct but polite. Ditching dates was neither polite nor direct. But Rilka could hardly blame Cynthia. Rilka sometimes wished she could escape Duncan by going to the bathroom and not coming out.
What am I going to do with you? She leaned forward and patted Duncan’s hand. “Have you thought any more about taking those night classes to obtain your GED?” Maybe it would improve his powers of concentration. You never knew.
He focused briefly on her. “I went one night, you know. But I’m not really an intellectual person,” he explained.
Well, that was true.
“Okay,” she said. Time to regroup. What now? She had to think of something. Unfortunately, the number of women lining up for men who were dumb as boxes of rocks was strictly limited. If Duncan were a woman, he’d have been taken off the market months ago. Men had absolutely no problem with women who were beautiful and dumb. In fact, that very much appeared to be their preferred combination of traits. But women couldn’t stand it. Rilka supposed this was social conditioning, but what did she know.